Beekeeper grooming youngsters to follow in her footsteps

A one-time Foreign Service Officer, 61-year-old Janice Fraser appears more than comfortable in her current role as a beekeeper. She fervently believes that beekeeping is one of the untapped sectors of the Guyana economy and has taken it upon herself to teach young men and women to become part of an industry in which, one day, they will become their own bosses.

These days, she is also busy developing her own brand, “Forever loving you honey.” Her immediate objective is to have her brand available across the country. She has acquired a plot of land on the Essequibo Coast. Very soon, she will be establishing an apiary there. These days she tends hives at several locations on the East Coast Demerara. She believes that there is an adequate market even in circumstances of increased production. “Right now I sell my honey through word of mouth and sometimes I don’t have enough to supply my clients so I have to sell on a first come, first served basis,” Fraser says.

Janice Fraser

It is the high demand for honey, she says, that persuaded her to share her skills with young unemployed men and women interested in engaging in a potentially lucrative business option. Her ‘class’ has ten students at this time. They are aged between seventeen and thirty. “I am encouraging them to do something on their own because you cannot sit down and expect the government to find work for you. In the future, I hope to see these persons with their own thriving businesses,” Fraser said, adding that she is urging more persons to get into honey production because “there is a business opportunity out there.”

As far as her own business is concerned she says she can hardly supply her clients. “I do not do any form of advertisement. People start paying me before I start extracting honey so there is room for persons and you don’t have much work to do with the bees.” Fraser says that with good management and fair weather conditions, a beekeeper can earn close to $400,000 per month from forty bee hives.

Fraser went into the bee-keeping sector in 1993 when she participated in a training session held in Brazil, where she was residing at the time. “I started the honey business there and then I came home. There were some bees on a tree in a school compound and they called me to remove them and that’s when I started my own hives here,” she said.

The proceeds from honey have helped to keep her family and have made it possible for her to expand her business.

National Agricultural Research and Extension Institute’s Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Oudho Homenauth credits the training provided by Fraser with offering a valuable business option to young people. He says that the aspiring beekeepers will also be making an important contribution to the agricultural sector since the pollination role played by bees increases production.

The efforts of the Ministry of Natural Resources attended by external support notwithstanding, the Government of Guyana still considers the phenomenon of gold smuggling to be seriously injurious to the country’s economy and in his recent 2018 budget presentation to the National Assembly, Finance Minister Winston Jordan set out the APNU+AFC administration’s proposals for helping to address this problem.

December 8, 2017

aNatural Resources Minister Raphael Trotman has disclosed three key objectives which the Government of Guyana will be pursuing in 2018 to consolidate its capacity to effectively service a modern oil and gas industry including a national oil company which will be charged with responsibility for overseeing the country’s commercial interest in the sector.

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Against the backdrop of longstanding concerns over a dire shortage of job opportunities in hinterland communities, government has disclosed plans in the 2018 budgetary proposals for a $200 million investment in the Hinterland Green Enterprise Development Centre at Bina Hill in Region Nine which, according to Finance Minister Winston Jordan, seeks to focus on areas of training “that leverages indigenous and traditional knowledge and drives upstream demand for local products and services.” The disclosure in Jordan’s 2018 budget presentation of what he describes as a “flagship initiative” comes against the backdrop of a growing clamour for the creation of job opportunities for residents of hinterland communities that go beyond their reliance on the production and sale of traditional craft and small scale agriculture.

December 8, 2017

Five months after the University of Guyana’s School of Entrepreneurship and Business, (SEBI) was launched, Dean of the new institution, Guyanese-born Professor Leyland Lucas has told the Stabroek Business that some of the challenges that repose in ensuring that the institution delivers on its mandate repose in the fact that “it is different.

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